Mass Graves For The Victims Of Nature's Fury



The above photo, by Olivier Laban Mattei, is from 'Haiti : Six Days Later' at The Boston Globe's The Big Picture.

Do you really think it would be any different in your city if 200,000 people died an earthquake? They'd be digging mass graves in New York's Central Park and Sydney's Botanical Gardens if those cities suffered a similar fate as Port-Au-Prince.

But would American newspapers show graphic photos of the dead, if they were in the majority dead Americans?

A New York Times photo editor insists that they would, and did during the Hurricane Katrina aftermath :

....the contention that such pictures would not appear in the paper if the victims were somewhere in the United States. If such pictures existed, she said, she would run them. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, The Times did publish a front-page picture of a body floating near a bridge where a woman was feeding her dog. But despite Katrina’s toll, there were relatively few such images in the paper. Irby said that authorities in the United States are generally quick to cordon off disaster scenes.

This stunning image from the 2004 tsunami is also cited as an example that Haiti is not the first time the New York Times has run graphic photos of natural disaster dead on its front page :



And yet, they are so reluctant to run images of the human carnage left behind in America's wars.